Still haven’t learned to leave well enough alone.

July 24, 2008

So with the chop laying more or less stagnant in the garage, I look at it multiple times every day. See I keep my smoking seats there and also the bicycles. Plus it is easier to leave the house through the garage than the front door. (That fucker gets hot from the sun in the afternoons.)

A couple of days ago I figured that I may as well get to doing some work on the damn thing before it decided to rot into its base elements.

So I drug out my handy angle grinder. I am guessing this thing is not more than 15 years old. It is a hand-me-down and things are going further and further out of spec, it is still spinning along and has yet to fail me. So I took the grinder and began to clean up the stuff I had done to my Fury a while back. I won’t lie, I am still not sure if I am keeping it, but I might as well take off my fuck ups in case I try to save it.

During this time I was also “cleaning up” the garage. Which is to say I was out there making a bigger mess and putzing around with all the stuff I was pulling out of boxes.

And while I was at it took a good shot of my old Davey Crockett (sp?) forward. Got a set and I need to clean them up. But since I do plan on going jockey shift, they will be getting some modifications done.

After I did the girder pieces (still not totally finished getting them flush to the trees) I put the wire wheel on the grinder to see if I could clean up the chrome on my valve covers. It didn’t work. Looks like I will probably have to locate a media blaster and get them down past the old chrome and then polish them up from there.

The wheel is getting pretty tired and has begun to fling pieces of wire while it’s running. So I was tagged a few times. And even had a couple pieces hit me in my angelic face (angelic HA!). But I had to get a pic of this one. I was smoking while I performed this bit of masochistic metalwork. And one wire decided to embed itself right in my Camel.

So I figure that I should purchase a new wire wheel before I do any more of that work.

Now a while back I actually had some money so I picked up a few things from Tommy over on the Honda Chopper board. ( http://lowridersbysummers.com ) So I have this snazzy set of new gaskets for my motor.

I had just assumed that the set was just the regular engine gaskets and nothing particular big. Well I was wrong. It came with new head and base gaskets and a host of other goodies that I probably would need sooner or later.

So I started thinking. Why not just tear the motor down and replace the gaskets? I can get inside and check out the motor and maybe get some other work done while I am at it.

So yesterday I started to pull the head.

Then ran into a big fucking snag. There are four head nuts that sit out in the weather. Well they are corroded, and I think that the PO thought that they needed to keep the fuckers nice and tight. Tight enough to strip the sides off a couple of the nuts. Sigh. So here I am with a half disassembled head and four nuts rusted and stripped and generally stuck. And of course they are stuffed down in the sparkplug hole. So I have to figure out how to get them off without hosing the heads. I will try to use my dremel kit to cut out the nuts, or may just drill them and cold chisel them the rest of the way off.